You are of course right about word usage, "learning" can various things, let's say:
1) inspiration and motivation,
2) fuzzy background knowledge and a right mindset,
3) explicit knowledge of a theoretical framework,
4) exploring the framework - filling gaps, building bridges, internalizing concepts,
5) training (theory, offline, field),
6) getting community support and help with problems,
7) organizing and simplification.
But then if I consider each of these separately, the current LessWrong seems lukewarm in all but 2), and I can easily point to (for me) more effective ways to accomplish the same goal for 1), 3), 4), 5) and 6):
1) read thousands of pages of Eliezer's braindump in a short span of time,
3) work through math and physics textbooks,
4) working together with people who are currently at a similar level, and are also learning about that particular topic (it does not matter if someone else did it before or not),
5) following individual people you can treat like your "jedi masters" (their methods and personalities need to resonate with you),
6) meeting folks in real life.
So I'm not denying 2) is important, but I think it rarely needs to be explicitly pursued, and also it comes with the danger of turning into a TED Talk-like disaster.
So maybe it would be a good idea to split/organise the content in LW depending on which part of "learning" its supposed to help with?
Your list is missing a very important thing: experience. After all that learning, you need to go out and actually do stuff. And in the process of doing you discover many things which your previous education skipped or didn't pay enough attention to.
but I think it rarely needs to be explicitly pursued
Depends on the need, doesn't it?
It's easy to underestimate that need, too. Recognizing you don't understand a particular theorem is not hard, but realizing you need "fuzzy" background context is not trivial at all.
Note 1: I'm not very serious about the second part of the title, I just thought it sounds more catchy. I'm a long time lurker writing here for the first time, and it's not my intention to alienate anyone. Also, hi, nice to meet you. Please leave a comment to achieve a result of making me happy about you having left a comment. But let's get to the point.
I think you might be familiar with TED Talks. Recall the last time you watched one, and how you felt while doing it.
[BZRT BZRT sound of imagination working]
In my case, I often got the feeling like if I was learning something valuable while watching most TED Talks. The speakers are (mostly) obviously passionate and intelligent people, speaking about important matters they care about a lot. (Granted, I probably haven't watched more than a dozen TED Talks in all my life, so my sample is quite small, but I think it isn't very unrepresentative.)
But at some point, I started asking myself afterwards:
Which translates in my internal dialect to:
(Note 2: don't treat this "one sentence summary" thing too strictly - of course it's only a reflex/shorthand that is useful in many situations, but not all. I like it because it's simple enough that it's installable as a subconscious trigger-action.)
And I could not state afterwards anything actually useful that I have learned from those "fascinating" videos (with at most one or two small exceptions).
This is exactly what I mean by "Education as Entertainment".
It's getting the enjoyable *feeling* of learning without any real progress.
[DUM DUM DUM sound of increasing dramatism]
And now, what if you use this concept to look at rationality materials?
For me, reading the core Eliezer's braindump (basically the content of "From AI to Zombies"), as well as braindumps (in the form of blogs) of several other people from the LW community, had definite learning value.
I take notes when I read those, and I have an accountability system in place that enables me to make sure I follow up on all the advice I give to myself, test the new ideas, and improve/drop/replace/implement as needed.
However, when I read (a significant part of) the content produced by the "modern" community-powered-LessWrong, I classify its actual learning value at around the same level as TED Talks.
Or YouTube videos with cats, only those don't give me the *impression* that I'm learning something.
THE END
Please let me know what you think.
Final Note: Please take my remarks with a grain of salt. What I write is meant to inspire thoughts in you, not to represent my best factual knowledge about the LW community.